La nuit sanglante

NIGHT OF BLODDY HORROR stars a young, impossibly thin Gerald McRaney as Wesley Stuart, a very troubled man who just can't get over his tragic past. It doesn't help his situation that his mother (Evelyn Hendricks) is an insufferable shrew.

When women start popping up dead, Wesley is the prime suspect.

Sort of a low rent version of PSYCHO, this movie has just enough weirdness to balance out the silliness that abounds. McRaney plays his role with extreme gusto, making us wonder if his head might just fly off at any moment!

Horror? Hahaha! This is a trashy so-called thriller that is slightly reminiscent of Hitchcock's Psycho. Only that this one is totally predictable and full of gore. Gerald McRaney gives a good performance, but it doesn't save the film from mediocrity. There is almost no suspense, in fact waiting to see if the next scene is worse than the one you are watching is far more suspenseful. Really, one would try hard to find a movie with more fake special effects than this one; the sound is often unsynchronized, while the red paint you keep in the basement would have worked better in the gore scenes! Anyway, this one's for the cult trash fans, like me.

3

...but contains some great library music (from the synth-noise opening theme to the bloodcurdling string arrangement played over the dream sequence near the film's end) and is full of cheap, dingy atmosphere. Gerald McRaney of "Simon and Simon" and "Major Dad" delivers a ridiculously overwrought performance as Wesley, a grumpy, balding young fella prone to crippling headaches. His girlfriends are being bumped off one after another, the police are leaning on him, and Wesley's corpse-faced mother obviously harbors a deep resentment for her troubled son. What's going on? Is Wesley a killer? You'll have the story figured out less than halfway through the film. "Night of Bloody Horror" offers up quite a few tasty morsels for bad-movie fans, including a lengthy nightclub scene featuring The Bored (a six- or seven-man psychedelic ensemble with the worst vocalist ever) and a wonderful moment in which Wesley's mother harangues him for "having no respect". McRaney has taken all the maternal abuse he can withstand; he twists his face into a disgusted grimace and snarls, "Why? For god's sake...WHY?!" before storming out of the room. William Shatner would be proud!

I could think of approximately a dozen other and more appropriate titles to name this film, but "Night of the Bloody Horror" certainly isn't one of them. Okay, I realize the creators just picked out of bunch of appealing key words that are likely to raise an interest among horror fans, but any movie title should at least be a bit relevant, don't you think? None of the main events - not even the finale – happen during the night, the film honestly isn't that bloody and it definitely isn't horrific. But still I suppose you can't be overly harsh or negative-minded when watching "Night of the Bloody Horror". This is the third film directed by Joy N. Houck Jr. that I've seen (alongside "The Brain Machine" and "Creature from the Black Lake"), and I can already make some vast establishments & generalizations regarding his entire repertoire. First of all, the good man clearly never experienced the pleasure of working with a halfway decent budget! All three films that I've watched were obviously made on a shoestring budget and therefore lacked proper editing, adequate lighting & photography and convincing make-up effects. On the other hand I also have to admit that the films don't really suffer that much from their own cheapness. They're all spirited and enthusiastically made mini horror-productions that attempt to cash in on contemporary classic genre titles. "Psycho" heavily inspires this film and it nearly goes over the top in trying to equal the same sinister atmosphere as Alfred Hitchcock's classic milestone. The script introduces Wesley Stuart; a thirty-something bachelor who clearly has a whole lot of issues to deal with. He has an uncanny & dominating mother (don't they all?), he spent 13 years in an asylum for accidentally causing his younger brother's death and regularly suffers from excruciating headaches that are illustrated through cheap 'n cheesy blue spirals. When two of his girlfriends are found brutally murdered (after the strange headaches caused a temporary blackout), the police automatically assume that Wesley resumed his old murderous habits again. "Night of Bloody Horror" is an okay time-waster, but it naturally doesn't feature any surprise elements or genuine thrills. The finale is embarrassingly predictable and the murders are substandard. The biggest problem, to me, is that Wesley Stuart is such a boring and faceless protagonist! Half an hour into the movie, I was still thinking: "Wait…who's this guy again? Oh right, he's the main character!" Gerald McRaney apparently went on to have a very successful career in television, but he totally lacks the charisma to play the lead role here. Another dreadful thing to endure here is the overload of needless and annoying padding material. In order to lengthen the film a bit, Houck Jr. adds pointless collages of Wesley's relationships and – even more irritating – endless footage of a rock band playing in a local redneck bar. The band's name is The Bored, by the way. Well, they surely inflect their name on to the viewers. "Night of Bloody Horror" isn't really worth checking out, except maybe if you're a very tolerant fan of no-budget horror.

This was another of those cheap low-budget horror movies I remember seeing in newspaper ads or television commercials on late night as a child in the '70s and wondering what they would be like. The version I watched on YouTube was a little faded and washed out but I saw clearly enough to understand what was going on and enjoy a little. I say a little since with the running time being about ninety minutes, there's not enough time to give too deep characterizations as to motive for the various murders that happen here. As the lead suspect, a young Gerald McRaney is pretty adequate in one of his earliest roles (though he must have considered himself the luckiest man with the women he kissed here). There's also a nightclub scene with a local rock band called The Bored that has a few sixties moments like having some frames printed in negative form with some painted colors added. (and can you dig the cyclone-like special effects that depicts McRaney's "migranes"?) Despite the tagline being "Keep telling yourself, It's only a picture, only a picture...", I don't think the few gore scenes were all that scary, in fact, they looked a bit fake. So on that note, Night of Bloddy Horror is no great shakes though it's not completely boring either. P.S. The theatre that was playing this movie in the late '70s (and perhaps the late '60s as well when this was first released) was the now-defunct Joy's Robert E. Lee one which had four screens during a time when most cinemas in our area had just two. The movie house I just mentioned was perhaps one of 200 owned by one Joy N. Houck, Sr. whose son, Joy Jr., was this film's director. By the way, my neighboring city New Orleans (where Joy Jr. was born) was the location used for filming.